cooking, eating and writing

smoky chicken

It looks like we’re finally getting a dose of summer here this week – just in time for school to start, naturally. I’ve been meaning to post about this grill-smoked chicken we made a few weeks back, maybe I should get it up here before autumn decides to settle in. I’m not likely to make it again any time soon, not because it wasn’t fantastic, but because the chickens we’ve been cooking (from Well Fed Farms) have been enormous and this bird fed us for a really long time, and I’ve had it up to here with the taste of smoked chicken. Hopefully you don’t have that problem, though, so you should totally try this.

We got this recipe from the recent barbecue issue of Saveur: a spatchcocked, spice-rubbed chicken cooked very slowly in smoke, then shredded and served on hamburger buns with a mayonnaise-horseradish sauce. It was very rich, so I added rather a lot of chopped green onion to brighten the flavor, then served it all with sliced sauteed zucchini from my garden. The greenery definitely helped – salad would have been good, too, or bread and butter pickles like the recipe suggests. Anything to balance the smoke and mayo. Also, the homemade buns we used were a bit too substantial – this would probably be a good time to use fluffy, squishy storebought buns.

Maybe by next summer I’ll be able to handle smoked chicken again. I sure hope so.